Meanwhile, somewhere not far from your Chrome cul-de-sac there are enough ongoing conversations in which the White House is casually, consistently, and pervasively called this horrible thing, that the world's largest arbiter of information also identifies it as such. "It's like believing that TV news is an unbiased mirror of society." Google doesn't show us the world just a curated version that it thinks we want to see. Shyam Sundar, Co-Director of Penn State University's Media Effects Research Laboratory.
"The fact that most people believe Google results are a reflection of reality is the real problem," says S. That effect isn't limited to social networks, either. We rarely see tabs that aren't presented to us either by friends or trusted sources our paths to content rigidly defined enough that it's almost impossible to find yourself lost in a bad part of town. It's easy to forget how much grossness lurks online, especially now that our browsing habits are largely dictated by social channels like Twitter and Facebook (the latter of which works overtime, literally, to scrub its feeds of filth). Unfortunately, it was discovered it's labeled photos of concentration camps as "jungle gyms," and at least two photos of human beings (one man, one woman) as "ape." Those errors, embarrassing and unfortunate as they are, stem not from a critical mass of offending users but from an algorithm that's more easily confused than advertised or intended. Recently, the photo site launched new auto-tagging features that intelligently label photos based on their contents. This is also what makes what happened to Google Maps different from Flickr's similar algorithmic issues.
In the case of the White House and other offensive Maps searches, the algorithm wasn't subject to a coordinated effort, it just gathered up all the data the internet could provide, and the internet provided trash. A group of people decided they wanted to game the "santorum" results and made it happen. And it's important to understand that while the technical function of producing the recent racist results are similar to how a Googlebomb works, there's one very big fundamental difference: A Googlebomb is calculated. In practice, though, it also means that if enough people online refer to a specific place using vile epithets, even one of the most recognizable landmarks in the United States can be reduced to racist garbage. In theory, this helps customers find shops and services near them that might otherwise be labeled too vaguely to be helpful. As search guru Danny Sullivan points out at SearchEngineLand, a recent Google update applied similar ranking logic to Maps as of late last year, incorporating mentions of locations across the Web to help more accurately surface them in searches, and to provide richer descriptions when they appear. What happened with Google Maps appears to have the same technical foundation as those concerted campaigns.
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